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lbourdoisย 
posted an update 1 day ago
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New blog post!
An introduction to a little-known but highly effective model reduction method: ๐—ง๐—ฟ๐—ถ๐—บ๐—บ๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ดโœ‚๏ธ
We show how to reduce model size (we went up to 87.24% reduction) while preserving its performance.

We applied this technique to 16 different model families across several modalities to illustrate that it works on any architecture (as long as the embedding layer is the last one of the model) and on any modality involving text.
From these 16 families, we generated over ๐Ÿฑ,๐Ÿฑ๐Ÿฌ๐Ÿฌ ๐—บ๐—ผ๐—ป๐—ผ๐—น๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด๐˜‚๐—ฎ๐—น ๐—บ๐—ผ๐—ฑ๐—ฒ๐—น๐˜€ ๐—ถ๐—ป ๐Ÿญ๐Ÿฎ๐Ÿฐ ๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐—ณ๐—ณ๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐—ป๐˜ ๐—น๐—ฎ๐—ป๐—ด๐˜‚๐—ฎ๐—ด๐—ฒ๐˜€ ๐ŸŒ

Key takeaways from our experiments:
1๏ธโƒฃ Trimming does not require a GPU. Our models were obtained on a CPU.
2๏ธโƒฃ This method scales up to at least 4B parameters (we did not test beyond that).
3๏ธโƒฃ Trimmed model is smaller than the original while preserving its performance. If you observe a slight performance drop, just fine-tuned to recover or even surpass the original performance.
4๏ธโƒฃ For an equivalent compute budget, it is better to trim then fine-tune rather than fine-tuning the original model. Since the model is smaller, you can run more epochs/show more data and get in fine a better model than the original.
5๏ธโƒฃ Trimming is a competitive alternative to distillation and quantization. E.g. we obtained our alternative to DistilBERT in 9 minutes on CPU vs. 90 hours of GPU for the latter.
6๏ธโƒฃ Trimming could generate reasoning traces in the language of the trimmed model. This could be an alternative to generating traces in English and then translating them into the desired language.

And many other things (such as how much data are needed, the impact of the database used, the order in which it should be done, etc.) are available in the blogpost!

Blogpost: https://huggingface.co/blog/lbourdois/introduction-to-trimming
Models: alphaedge-ai/Trimming_models_search

S/o to my HF bros @tomaarsen @BramVanroy @woojun-jung @christopher @mrm8488 @prithivMLmods for this 4 months work project

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